Metal cutting is a leading technique in the mechanical engineering which is due to its wide capabilities of ensuring minimum possible cycle of preparation to the production of structurally intricate workpieces, low power requirements and big savings in performing complicate and labour-consuming finishing operations. The main problem of the development of the cutting technique is associated with an improvement of its productivity with concurrent meeting of high requirements imposed on accuracy and quality of machining of surfaces. The importance of the problem become greater due to a widespread application in the technology of new hard-to-machine materials making the machining performance 10-25 times lower than in cutting carbon and alloyed structural steel.
Known methods aimed at improving the performance of cutting, accuracy and quality of finished surfaces which are based on improvement of construction and optimization of geometrical parameters of cutting portion of known tools, improvement of quality of their working surfaces, application of new types of coolants and special machining methods, such as superhigh speed cutting with heating or deep cooling of a tool or a workpiece are either rather complicated and labour-consuming or insufficiently effective.
At the same time, an important reserve for an expansion of production capabilities of cutting rests with methods of rotary cutting in which additional rotation is imparted to circular cutting edges of a tool about its axis. This is ensured by appropriately positioning the tool relative surface to be machined.
With the rotary cutting, due to an additional rotation of the cutting edges of the tool, the sliding speed of the working surfaces of the tool relative to the material being machined is lowered by 1.5-3 times in comparison with the known methods. Furthermore, the length of the active portion of the cutting edge is increased and the time of contact of each point of the cutting blade with the material being machined is reduced by scores of times, respectively. The combination of the above advantages ensures a multiple increase in the tool life, hence improves productivity, accuracy and quality of machining.
Alongside the above advantages of the rotary cutting, this method exhibits a disadvantage of low immunity to vibrations. This limits the possibilities of the method as regards the provision of high accuracy and quality of machining.